The cause of the coming meat shortage

There is no actual shortage in livestock. (Remember, farmers are about to kill their produce needlessly.) Rather, the breakdown is coming on the plant side of the equation where cramped quarters are hazardous. Why cant farmers sell directly to consumers and circumvent this problem? You guessed it  government regulations.

In 1967, the federal government blocked states from making their own decisions on how meat was processed and promptly handed the power to the Department of Agriculture, or USDA.

What followed was essentially a takeover of control of the industry. Farmers had to travel long distances and sell their livestock to a small number of USDA slaughterhouses instead of to local butchers, small processors, or directly to consumers. This relationship began to severely impact their profit margins as the government was able to force farmers to sell their product for pennies on the dollar. When you limit the number of places the producers can sell, you control the prices.

Wait, what? Why? Why was this done, why was it considered good policy? Even if you want the FDA to have regulatory control of food safety, why would you require in those regulations that food be processed in a large central facility instead of in a distributed (and thus resilient) system?

Let's let the free market and competition solve this problem.

This entry was published Tue May 19 01:35:52 CDT 2020 by TriggerFinger
and last updated 2020-05-03 06:56:59.0.
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